After the Heart Attack: Matt Dillahunty, Part-Time Vegan, Full-Time Hypocrite.

my take on veganism with it being a moral virtue and not a moral duty um is pretty straightforward i haven't seen a compelling case for yet to kind of jump that last fence and while i'm not vegan i am you know mostly partially i don't i don't even know what percentage but i'm eating more and more vegetarian and vegan meals on a regular basis and whenever that option is available to me um unless i really feel like i need something and one of the things is because of this heart surgery i'm probably going to end up eating more fish and less non-fish meat and maybe cut out non-fish meat entirely just have fish because i'm on specific heart-healthy diet stuff i think it's morally virtuous i'm just not convinced that it's a moral duty but what if there's no such thing as duty what if it simply doesn't exist in the same sense that sin the will of god divine retribution and punishment in the afterlife in the same sense that those things don't exist except inasmuch as they are imagined and believed in within the skulls of a certain number of christian bipeds walking the earth what if in that same sense this notion of duty is being something very different from virtue doesn't exist except within the mind's eye of one eccentric man who is now slowly dying of atherosclerosis because of his immoral self-indulgent diet what then matt what if we live in a world where figuring out for ourselves what is and what is not the right thing to do cannot rely on any notion of duty and it can't even rest on the consequences of our actions because what is the right thing to do and what is the wrong thing to do is profoundly unrelated to the question of what we can get away with doing what we can do without suffering harm without suffering negative consequences ourselves even some of my i'll say former friends who are vegans uh and and talk about the ethics of it sustainable eating is one facet of why they consider it a moral virtue and perhaps for those who think it's a moral duty sustainable eating and the impact of farming on the on the climate are probably the too strongest for them trying to claim it's moral duty i'll tell you this um i've gotten a bad rap um because of some kind some some things i said early on that were kind of glib but also some back and forth with some vegan people who are have converted their way of life of looking at something um are often going to be zealous or once you find that there's a problem you start seeing aspects of that problem everywhere and if somebody's trying to start an argument i just block them i have i have zero interest oh and they can say i'm close-minded i have a show they can call me here we can have the conversation here uh they can say i'm close-minded all day i don't know what the vegan lifestyle is but veganism um as a view whether it's it could be based on ethical veganism like somebody refused to eat or use any animal products at all for ethical reasons and there are people who are vegans for health reasons with respect to the the ones doing it for ethical reasons i think it's morally virtuous i'm just not convinced that it's a moral duty in the same way that you know it's morally virtuous of you to to donate to cancer research and to put your life at risk to save somebody else but it's not a moral duty it's not like you become immoral for not doing those and that's that's the only take i've got on on veganism at all he chooses remarkably a self-defeating example he says that it's not your duty to risk your life to save another that it's not a duty to sacrifice your own life to help someone else but there are so many jobs in which you will find it's explicitly stated in the text of the contract you sign that if you take this job it is your duty it is your duty to do exactly that to risk your life and sometimes once in a while to lose your life so that someone else can live or just so that someone else can have a chance there are people in this audience right now who have jobs with that kind of warning explicitly stated in the contract and i have applied for jobs i have considered going into careers where it was explicitly stated to me up front in text this job can involve killing people and the person who dies might be you or might be one of your best friends so think it over before you sign this contract the difference between a duty and a virtue i'm not gonna say to you that it is always meaningless or always counterproductive to think in these terms on the contrary there are many court cases where you will find police officers firemen volunteers at orphanages and of course soldiers in times of war cross-examined in terms of the extent to which they were derelict in their duties which they failed to do things that were obligatory for them to do as opposed to merely being incompetent purely failing to live up to virtues that were above and beyond what mere duty would require but how is it possible that this man who is i think not coincidentally a retired former employee of the american military has come to carry around this hammer and see every problem as a nail sobriety is it a duty or is it a virtue why would you even be asking the question if you have a friend you care about let's say you have a younger brother and he started doing cocaine on the weekends and he started doing heroin and fentanyl on mondays and tuesdays and you see him going down a spiral what do you say to your little brother when he tells you he has no obligation to be sober that he recognizes sobriety as a virtue but not as his duty not as an obligation not that it's something that would make him evil for failing to live up to wouldn't it start to seem that this distinction between duty and virtue is nothing but an excuse making mentality and an excuse of a particular kind that is harder to quit than the habit itself whether we're speaking about drugs chocolate yogurt beef veal fish or in your case matt the excuses you make for your massively inflated opinion of your own intellectual ability [Music] [Applause]